the button has ended — more than two months and a million presses later #

favicon poetry — write using favicons from around the web #

Let's Consider — navigating phone trees as collective art #

Yahoo closes Pipes — sunsetting the long-neglected service that Tim O'Reilly once called "a milestone in the history of the internet" #

Laughing and crying my way through the new Google Photos — "My grandfather is dying. The cloud is alive. Our future is bizarre" #

XOXO expanding into permanent, year-round workspace — coming this fall, 13,000 square feet of raw potential in Portland #

After Water — Susie Cagle's story of the California drought is terrifying #

Scroll-O-Meter — Sarah Rothenberg makes neat stuff #

DENNIS — interactive, audio-responsive music video; see also: jazz.computer #

Exhausting a Crowd — creepy surveillance art by Kyle McDonald (via) #

LEGO Universe's dong detection problem — until recently, Minecraft never hosted servers, so it wasn't an issue for them #

Mystery Show #2, "Britney" — Starlee Kine's endless curiosity about other people is the best part of her new podcast #

Here Comes the Airplane — hot on the heels of TrashDay #

The Mind of a Teen Bot — Olivia Taters, still suspended from Twitter, now in comic form #

An incomplete list of words that are now startups  #

Jeremy Keith on the messy, beautiful web — "The web has no gatekeepers. The web has no quality control. The web is a mess. The web is for everyone." #

Kung Fury — the insanely ridiculous Kickstarter-funded short film is finished #

Cheap Bots, Done Quick! — free tool for making Twitter bots using Tracery #

Space Weird Thing — remaking Space Oddity using only the thousand most-common words in the English language #

Extra Credit on Rust's representation of race — the game devs randomly and permanently assign skin color to players with interesting results #

Analysis of Twitter's 133k verified accounts — 25% are journalists; collected by scraping who @Verified follows #

Screentendo — turn a selection of your OS X screen into a playable Super Mario level #

Hot Topic buys ThinkGeek — this will only surprise someone who hasn't been in a Hot Topic in a decade #

Volvo responds to self-parking car accident video — sorry, pedestrian detection costs extra #

Millennials to Snake People — "Who are they? What do they want?" #

The Counselor — Robin Sloan's near-future scifi short story of persuasive AI in medicine #

TNG Edits, "Riker" — a new TNG Edit after five years! the original series of remixes were instant classics #

Mystery Show's debut episode — new podcast from Gimlet and This American Life's Starlee Kine #

On A Plate — short comic nicely articulates privilege #

Deep learning robots use trial and error for motor tasks — we need a word for the feeling when something is equally exciting and terrifying #

Redrawing Shake It Off — 49 animation students each rotoscoped 52 out of 2,767 total frames #

Ta'izz — third part of Maciej Ceglowski's incredible travelogue series #

Flickr faces complaints over offensive auto-tagging in photos — completely predictable outcome for a frustratingly unnecessary feature #

endless.horse — long horse is long #

Sony's secret contract with Spotify — streaming's a good deal if you're a major label, but indies are stuck with paltry royalties only #

Paul Ford on the No Manifesto — the whole Chicago Review PDF is worth reading #

Christina Xu on killing projects with dignity — ending something in a deliberate way is a time for celebration and closure #

Other People's Playlist — Paul Ford on Spotify's social network of related artists #

Timelapse Mining from Internet Photos — clustering 86 million photos found online #

Bizarre easter egg in Kanye Quest JRPG — ASCEND (via) #

Drunk Shopping — get texted something stupid every Saturday at 2am #

A Millennial Revenge Fantasy — "You refused to buy us Lunchables, and now you must pay." #

Roman Mars on the design of city flags — the lovely PDX flag gets a shout-out at the end #

Facebook launches Instant Articles — The Awl's John Herrman had the best thoughts on the implications I've seen #

A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art — part of the reason why I ran my experiment #

It's Not About You — "Sometimes a conversation just doesn't need your input." #

Typedrummer — use parentheses for triplets like this #

Windows 95 emulated in the browser — 47MB download and slow as hell, but crazy impressive #

The Verge feature on startups drawing inspiration from casinos — which, in turn, exploits behavioral psychology to take player's money #

Video game execution watched by 325,000 players — the security lead took over the character in-game, stripped, killed, and deleted him #